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One of The 10 Top Earning Bloggers- Ewdison Then, ‘Slash Gear': $60,000 – $80,000 per month

Bsuccess.Org: Ewdison Then, ‘Slash Gear': $60,000 – $80,000 per month
Ewdison Then is the co-founder and executive editor of this consumer electronic and tech news site. He also works as a media publisher for his blog within the site and as CEO of R3 Media LLC.

SlashGear is “geared” towards consumers in need of tech gadgets. If you’re in need of an iPhone 5S, tablet, iPad, or looking to get your hands on the newest, coolest touch screen than you will love Then, because that’s what he does. He puts tech lovers in touch with the latest news regarding all kinds of technology and gadgets. His blog is consistent with its updates and aids readers in becoming the first to get a hold of a new fantastic gadget or app.

One of The 10 Top Earning Bloggers- Ewdison Then, ‘Slash Gear': $60,000 – $80,000 per month bsuccess.org

Most of Then’s income comes from pay-per-click advertising. His overhead has to be incredibly small as he only staffs about 13 people for this small enterprise. SlashGear is also notable for being the most successful blog to utilize the WordPress platform.

tragic secret:Kayla Mueller's friends guarded family

Bsuccess.Org: Carl Mueller was an active member and former president of the club. Kayla was well-known there, too — when she had been home for a visit in summer 2013, she had come to speak to the club about her work abroad; the local newspaper had even written a story about her speech.

Things since then had seemed normal, with Carl going to regular meetings. That February day, it became clear the normalcy had been a facade.

Kayla, who had since returned to Turkey, had crossed into war-torn Syria and been captured by Islamic extremists.

Carl started to tell Ballard the details but stopped short when someone else walked into the room.

But before the two parted, Carl relayed to Ballard what he would say to so many others over the 18 months of Kayla's captivity. You can't say anything, he told her — Kayla's name can't be released in the news.

"He came to Kiwanis meetings for several months; after a while, he had to quit coming," Ballard said. "Too many people would say, 'Hey, how's Kayla doing?' It was too hard for him to say, 'She's doing fine,' tears in his eyes."
Carl and Marsha Mueller, and those who knew their secret, had no way of knowing then how it would come to an end. On Feb. 6, the name of their daughter, Kayla Mueller, would be released by the very group that first insisted it be kept quiet. After 18 months in the captivity of the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, the terrorist group reported that Kayla had been killed by a Jordanian air strike.

Although the manner of death still cannot be confirmed, the Muellers confirmed her death days later.

Interviews over the past two weeks with friends in Prescott and elsewhere trace the path of the secret her parents kept. The truth spread slowly but deliberately, first to a chosen few, then to several dozen. Some had pieced it together days after the abduction; others were told after several months.

A few days later, Bonnie said, Marsha invited her over and told her everything they knew. At the time, the rule was that no details could even be discussed over the phone, Bonnie said. Marsha gave Bonnie permission to tell Brandy over Skype, although not directly. She would use euphemisms like "that person we've been worried about," Bonnie recalled.

Over the next several months, Bonnie and Marsha would talk for hours, Bonnie said, with the women always believing Kayla would eventually win her captors over.

Across town and around the same time, Cindy Craig said, she had a vision.

"A lot of people would think this sounds crazy," she said. After becoming a Christian more than seven years ago, she said, she began to have visions. About the time Kayla was abducted, Cindy had another one — about Kayla.

"Two days, three days after she'd been taken, I called (Mueller's parents)," she said. "I just knew. I just knew."

Cindy said she kept the information from everyone she knew.

"The only thing that I ever did was in our prayer group — and I asked her mom if I could have permission to do this," Cindysaid. "I said, can we pray for Kayla? I'll just put down that there's a young girl in Turkey, and we'll just pray for her safety." Cindy said Marsha gave her consent.

Carl Mueller also began to approach select people, people he wanted to tell. He had tracked down then-Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett to ask for his help; Bennett had put him in touch with top officials in Washington.

By the new year of 2014, Carl talked to Linda Ballard at the Kiwanis Club.

He also went to the Daily Courier in Prescott, ready to plead with its editors, according to staff at the newspaper.

In a meeting with City Editor Tim Wiederaenders and then-Managing Editor Karen Despain, he said his daughter had been kidnapped in Syria.

I wanted to let you guys know first, staff recalled Carl saying, but please, please, don't publish anything. Going public would mean death for his daughter.

The issue went to the publisher, Kelly Soldwedel Thornhill, who considered the request and ultimately agreed. The paper would not release any information until they received Mueller's approval.

Soldwedel Thornhill said no tips were ever leaked to the paper on the matter.

"It was pretty silent," she said last week in an interview with The Republic. "We didn't want her endangered, so why would we do anything to get her worse off?"

For much of the year, the secret steeped quietly.

In July 2014, U.S. forces conducted a raid on an ISIL compound in Syria. Officials later announced the operation, saying it had been a failed attempt to liberate another American hostage, James Foley. Officials did not say at the time that Kayla, too, was among those they were trying to save.

By November 2014, Carl was worried that news of Kayla's capture would soon be released and would blindside the other members of the Kiwanis Club. So, in a carefully worded letter that would be shared with the entire 70-member club, he released the basic information.

After that letter, the Kiwanis Club members flooded the Muellers with support, Ballard said, raising money for travel and other expenses. At one point, Carl mentioned that all of the other ISIL hostages' mothers had tablets to better track relevant news reports.

"So I decided she needed a tablet, and said, let's raise some money," Ballard said. "Whatever they needed. ... Kiwanis members, they all kept saying, 'What can we do, what can we do?'"

The circle was larger, but the secret held. Then, in January, there came a slip.

White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough was making the full run of Sunday-morning news shows Jan. 25. When he appeared on ABC's This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked if there was any information on the American woman being held by ISIL.

"We are sparing no expense and sparing no effort, both in trying to make sure that we know where they are and make sure that we're prepared to do anything we must to try to get them home," McDonough said. "But Kayla's family knows how strongly the president feels about this, and we will continue to work this."[usatoday]

Australia Post Flags First Annual Loss in 30 years

Bsuccess.org: Sydney. Australia Post on Monday forecast its first annual loss in more than 30 years and warned it would lose A$6.6 billion ($5.2 billion) over the next decade without urgent regulatory reform.

The government-owned company said its net profit fell 56 percent to A$98 million in the latter half of 2014 due to a slump in demand for letters.

Like many postal services in developed countries, Australia Post has been struggling to cope as e-mail replaces physical mail. Letter volumes dropped 8.2 percent in the second half of last year, the sharpest decline since they first started falling in 2008.

Chief executive Ahmed Fahour said plunging profits from Australia Post’s letter arm, which lost A$157 million over the period, were swallowing up profits from its competitive parcel business.

“We have been carefully managing the real decline in our letter volumes for the past seven years,” he said.

“But we have now reached a tipping point where we can no longer manage that decline, while also maintaining our nationwide networks, service reliability and profitability.”

Fahour called for reform of government regulations that apply to letters, including increasing the price of stamps and allowing a two-speed delivery service.

He pointed to a government-commissioned report last year which predicted that Australia Post will lose A$12.1 billion from its letter business and A$6.6 billion overall in the next decade without reform.

“This year we are forecasting a full-year loss for the first time. It is urgent we make changes this year to ensure we can continue to maintain a reliable, accessible postal service for all Australians,” Fahour added.

The Post Office Agents Association Limited, which represents the owners of licensed post offices and mail contractors, backed the call for changed to mail pricing be considered by parliament.

But it also urged the company to diversify its business.

“Ultimately, reform to the letters service is just stemming the bleeding — Australia Post needs to focus on finding new customers and new revenue streams,” it said.

Australia’s postal service is the nation’s oldest, continuously operating organization, celebrating 200 years in 2009.

Agence France-Presse

Australia Quiet on Rights Abuses in Return for Asylum Deal: Sri Lankan PM

Bsuccess.Org-Sydney. The Australian government agreed not to criticize Sri Lanka’s alleged human rights abuses in order to secure cooperation on stopping asylum-seeker boats headed to Australia, Sri Lanka’s new prime minister said in an interview published on Monday.

Australia has been criticised at home and abroad for its tough immigration policies, including sending asylum seekers to camps in impoverished Papua New Guinea and Nauru, where they face long periods of detention.

Conservative Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa last year agreed to a controversial deal allowing Australian naval ships to send asylum seekers intercepted at sea directly back to Sri Lanka.

The United Nations has launched an inquiry into war crimes allegedly committed by both Sri Lankan state forces and ethnic Tamil rebels in the final months of South Asian country’s 26-year civil war that ended in 2009, saying the government has failed to investigate properly. Sri Lanka rejects such allegations as interference in its internal affairs.

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was elected earlier this year, told The Australian newspaper that members of the former government were personally involved in the people-smuggling trade but stopped after receiving assurances Australia would not criticise its rights record.

“It was being done by people with Rajapaksa connections, but once this deal was done between Australia and the Rajapaksa government, where you looked the other way, then secretary of defense got the navy to patrol,” he told The Australian.

“You could not have got anyone out of this country without someone in the security system looking the other way, the police or the navy,” Wickremesinghe said.

A spokeswoman for Abbott did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the report.

Under former Labor Party Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Australia came under fire for toning down its criticism of Sri Lanka’s rights record, while at the same time greatly stepping up cooperation on asylum seekers.

While Sri Lanka says many asylum seekers are economic migrants, rights groups say Tamils seek asylum to prevent torture, rape and other violence at the hands of the military. They say some of the majority Sinhalese ethnic group who criticise the government are also at risk.

Wickremesinghe said Australia would not find the new government in Colombo receptive to a similar deal, and criticised Abbott for turning a blind eye to rights abuses in order to accomplish its domestic political agenda.

“When human rights were being trampled, and democracy was at bay, these countries were silent. That is an issue for Sri Lanka,” he told the newspaper.[thejakartaglobe]

Honda, in Unexpected Move, Says CEO Ito to Step Down

Honda Motor, in an unexpected move, said on Monday that chief executive Takanobu Ito would step down in late June, making way for managing officer Takahiro Hachigo after six years in the top post.
Hachigo, 55, an engineer, joined Honda in 1982 with a career spanning several countries including the United States, China, and Britain.

Japan’s number three automaker has hit a rough patch over the past year with quality problems that have led to multiple recalls of its popular Fit hybrid subcompact.

"Father of the Datsun Z,” Dead at 105:Yutaka Katayama

Bsuccess.org: Yutaka Katayama, the former president of what’s now Nissan Motor Co.’s U.S. branch, has died at the age of 105, the Associated Press reports. “Mr. K,” as he was known to company insiders and Datsun and Nissan fans, established the Z line of sports cars that guaranteed the racing and sales success of the company in the U.S.
"Father of the Datsun Z,” Dead at 105:Yutaka Katayama

Born in 1909 in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, Mr. K was hired by Nissan Motor Co. in 1935. His first job was in publicity and he later worked in advertising, creating novel lifestyle-based ad campaigns in an era when, as Nissan puts it, most car ads just “loudly repeated the car’s name over and over.” Mr. K is also credited with establishing the All-Japan Motor Show in 1954, an industry-wide car show that evolved into today’s Tokyo auto show.

But it was a motorsports victory that turned Mr. K’s career down the path toward the Z-car. In 1958, two Datsun 210s won their class in the grueling Mobilgas Around Australia Trial, a 10,000-mile rally across the unimproved roads of the Outback. Mr. K was the racing team manager, and the class victory spurred Nissan to begin global exports.

In 1960, the company sent Mr. K to Los Angeles, and he began building a U.S. dealer network from scratch. “In the beginning, Datsun dealers had no status or prestige, and they were not wealthy either,” Mr. K said. “During the difficult times, we all gritted our teeth and worked together and we made it through. For me, they are not just dealers but friends. I’m speaking like I’m a big man, but I owe everything to them.”

As Edmunds so eloquently explained on the occasion of Mr. K’s 100th birthday, Katayama’s dogged determination pushed Datsun to the forefront of foreign cars in the U.S. “Katayama built Datsun (as the Nissan franchise in America then was called) into a sales powerhouse, personally canvassing every town in America and turning used-car dealers and lawnmower repair shops into Datsun franchises. He made Datsun the most important Japanese brand in America, a signature of quality and innovation instead of cheap imitation.”

When Datsun introduced the 510 in 1967, Mr. K’s dealer network was ready. And with the company’s parts bin at his disposal, Mr. K set out to create Nissan’s most iconic vehicle: the 240Z. As Katayama himself recalls:

    How can we transpose the relationship between man and horse into the one between man and car? Even after I was sent to Los Angeles in 1960 to establish Nissan Motors in the U.S., this question never really left me. Eventually I came up with the concept of the Z-car. It was a sports car with a sleek body with a long nose and a short deck, designed so that it could be built utilizing some of the parts and components that were already used in our other production cars, and it was a car that anybody could drive easily and that would give the driver that incredible feeling of jubilation that comes when car and driver are as one.

In 1970, when the 510-based 240Z reached U.S. shores, it had Mr. K’s fingerprints all over it. Allow Nissan to explain Mr. K’s role in creating the company’s first true sports car:

    Though many, many people were responsible for the design and engineering of the first generation 240Z, its success in North America can be attributed to Yutaka Katayama, who was president of Nissan’s U.S. operations at the time. Known affectionately as “Mr. K,” he was convinced that the company’s new sports car design would be a hit in the U.S.  There was just one problem—the vehicle’s name: the Fairlady Z.

Mr. K re-christened the car as the 240Z for the U.S. market, and his wisdom paid off: The Z car was a wild success in motorsports and sales alike, establishing Datsun, and later Nissan, as a major brand with a strong enthusiast following.

Katayama retired from Nissan in 1977, but he remained a car guy right through to the end, earning a spot in the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1998. On his 100th birthday, Mr. K was still as feisty as ever, criticizing the Nissan 370Z as “so-so,” bemoaning its weight and price. “I’d like to have a sports car like the Miata,” Mr. K said in 2009. “The Miata is taking the place of the 240Z …. The fun of driving cars is the same as riding a horse. We need a car that is like riding on horseback. We are making robots. Robots don’t like human control.”

In Nissan’s own profile of the man, he raised similar concerns about the future of sports cars:

    A sports car doesn’t have to be luxurious. It should be affordable so that anyone can own one, it should be easy to maintain, and it should be something that you can enjoy without having to spend too much money. To attach a price tag of $50,000 to a sports car just seems uncomfortable to me. You can get any price you want if you increase the number and level of features and equipment. But if you don’t add any extra equipment and features and you can still experience great exhilaration when driving, then that’s the best situation as far as I am concerned.

The beloved Mr. K turned 105 years old in September, attributing his health to the three liters of water he drank every day—though he also loved a good steak. Nissan produced a three-part documentary interview with the automotive legend to commemorate the occasion. It’s equal parts history lesson, business plan, and guide for enthusiastic living. source

Indonesia to Host the 24th World Economic Forum on East Asia

Bsuccess.org: Apart from having the honour to be the host of 2015 Asia-Africa Conference which will be held in April, Indonesia has also been chosen as the perfect spot for the world-class Companies CEO meeting known as the 24th World Economic Forum on East Asia. The event will be in Jakarta on the 19 through to the 21 of April 2015.

The event will be attended by a number of prominent owners of worldwide established companies, and those leading in the economic field from various countries.

The Senior Director of Asia-Pacific World Economic Forum, Palakurthi Rao said that the theme of this year’s gathering will be ‘Anchoring Trust in East Asia’s New Regionalism’ which will be centered around three dominant topics, the new region context, the new economic context and lastly, the new citizenship context.
Indonesia to Host the 24th World Economic Forum on East Asia

"We will be holding the 24th World Economic Forum on East Asia to discuss the strengthen regional cooperation among all involving nations and to accelerate the socio-economic development in the region," he said during a press conference at the Ministry of Trade office, Central Jakarta, Wednesday (18/02/2015). 

As a country whose population is the fourth largest in the world and as a nation whose economy is growing more rapidly than ever, it is unquestionable that Indonesia has what it takes to become the host of one of the most important events in the international history. President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo has successfully directed its cabinet into working more effectively to present a better Indonesia in the worldwide stage.

"We will have many important people such as businessmen, politicans, influential civilians, experts, and many other equally important individuals know that Indonesia has a lot to offer. And we will have these people attend the events which will be carried out in Indonesia,"" he continued.

The event will be led by a number of Indonesian Co-Chairs such as the Executive Director of Lippo Group and Global Sharper John Riady, The Executive Head of Mandiri Bank Budi Gunadi Sdikin and the Director of IOM William Lacy Swing.liputan6